“Bad Result, but we didn’t play well”, Rio Ferdinand tweeted. Not the most insightful piece of journalism I thought, yet it was widely reported. On the day Mr Ferdinand (sometime Manchester United defender and media darling) updated his twitter account, his football club where in shut down mode.
Their petulant manager had thrown his toys out of the pram the day before and ordered everyone at the club to shun the media. For those of you who aren’t slaves to the whore that is English football, I should point out that Manchester United are the self styled “Biggest club in the world” and if the woman who cleans the toilets at their monstrosity of a stadium was suffering with an itchy foot, it would normally result in a press conference attended to by the cream of the world’s media.
So a media blackout caused panic and journalists did what is now their default action. They turned to the world wide web to fill the vacuum. They looked at amateur blogs to see what the ordinary man was saying about this drastic situation. Journalists condemn blogging as a dilution of their great art, even though they are happy to dip in on blogs when it suits them. After that, they looked up twitter, where the famous share their inane thoughts for the benefit of people with no lives but access to a smart phone.
And there they found Ferdinand’s simplistic message and they parsed and dissected it, as though it was the Wisdom of Solomon.
I wanted to be a journalist when I left school. I had my paperwork all ready and had been offered a place in the College of Journalism. Faith alas intervened and through a lack of financial resources and ambition I ended up in Accountancy.
My desire to write had been nourished by teenage years spent buried in investigative magazines. This was an era of El Salvador, the Falklands War, the dark years of the Northern Ireland and the misery and corruption of 80’s Irish life. It was a boom time for journalists like John Pilger and Robert Fisk to scrape the underbelly of world affairs. I loved it and desperately wanted to be like them - travelling the world and uncovering secrets that the powerful don’t want us to know about.
I had no interest in the mundane side of journalism. Reporting on council meetings and car accidents and writing obituaries for people you’d never met. I imagined that I’d finish college and be brought on to the editorial staff of Newsweek and given the job of discovering the secret links between Margaret Thatcher and Saudi Royal Family.
Though I spend my life now buried in spreadsheets and cash flow statements, I don’t regret the missed opportunity I had as a teenager. For journalism is a dishonoured profession now. From the outside it seems that they don’t even have to leave their offices anymore. They can just sit at a PC and surf all the social media and let the story come to them.
The biggest story in Melbourne this summer is the St. Kilda schoolgirl saga, which is ironic because the lady involved is neither from St. Kilda nor a schoolgirl. She is a 17 year old who allegedly slept with a number of footballers and more recently caught a football manager in a very public honey trap. What makes the story interesting is her skilful use of social media. She initially published nude pictures of footballers on Facebook and later teased the drooling public by drip-feeding new revelations on twitter.
The story culminated in the honey trap. She contacted a trashy newspaper and told them how she had been in contact via text message with the 47-year-old football manager. The paper booked her into a hotel room and told her to invite the manager round. When he turned up they were ready to photograph him going in and coming out of the hotel.
He has now been sacked while the girl has signed six figure contracts with TV stations and magazines. It is life Jim, but not as we know it.
Not only does this show that journalists are now been led by the nose by Facebook and twitter, but when things get a bit slow they end of creating the story themselves. Why wait for news to happen when you can install a 17-year girl in a hotel room and watch the news develop in front of you.
I hanker back to the old days when journalists’ doorstepped celebrities and politicians to get real quotes. Now you are more likely to read, “Charlie Sheen could not be reached for comment, but he did say on twitter….”.
And it’s not just the trashy populist press that does this. The big papers have become just as lazy. Their big story in the last few months has been the Wikileak’s revelations, which looked like it would be the biggest scoop since Watergate until you actually read them. Finding out that the Bush administration thought Kim Il Jong was a nutter is hardly earth shattering and the ease with which the information was obtained (a memory stick and a naïve American serviceman) was disproportionate the magnitude of the story.
Investigative journalism should be about shady meetings in underground car parks and documents smuggled out of prisons in body cavities. That’s why I felt disappointed when I saw my old hero, John Pilger, on the steps of a London courthouse defending Julian Assange. I don’t dispute the politics of the situation or that Wikileaks is pointing a well-deserved finger at the powers that be. But they have cheapened journalism at the same time by saying that all information should be publically assessable. If that’s the case there will be no room left for the humble gumshoe to uncover that which is hidden from us.
Perhaps it was just as well then that I became an Accountant and not a Journalist. We merely caused the Global Financial Crisis, but that my friend is a completely different story. Tune in next week for more revelations.
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